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Jet Pilot Who Saved 304 Finds Heroism Tainted

The first reports were of a doomed flight salvaged at the last moment by quick thinking and heroism. But by now, the story of how a Canadian jet crossing the Atlantic survived disaster has changed into a tangle of missteps.

For the 304 people on Air Transat Flight 236 last month, a hard landing in the Azores provided a moment of miraculous relief. With neither of its engines working, the stricken plane glided safely -- if in terrifying silence -- almost a hundred miles, and landed without serious injuries.

The feat was accomplished by a skillful, laconic pilot with a maverick past, who came home to Canada a few days later asking not to be called a hero. Then he disappeared into remote Quebec.

Now the 49-year-old pilot, Robert Piché; his co-pilot, Dirk DeJager, 28; and Air Transat, a Montreal-based charter airline, are all under investigation about decisions made before and during the drama. One of the most serious questions is whether the captain magnified the crisis by transferring fuel from the working engine to the failing engine, not realizing that it was leaking.

Travel agents report cancellations of Air Transat bookings or refusals to fly on its two dozen planes. A multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit against the company, charging maintenance lapses, has been filed on behalf of the passengers. On Thursday the Canadian government fined the airline about $160,000 for maintenance violations and restricted the company's over-water flights, requiring them to stay closer to land.

Moreover, after years of trans-Atlantic crossings by two-engine aircraft, some misgivings are surfacing about the safety of such flights, though the industry insists that two engines are all but failproof.

The facts of this unfolding drama are the stuff of a film script. The first look is provided by the initial investigations in Portugal and Canada, crew reports, the company and passenger accounts.

Flight 236 was on its way from Toronto to Lisbon overnight on Aug. 23-24 with 291 passengers and a crew of 13. The plane was a European-built Airbus A330-200 with two Rolls-Royce engines. Both manufacturers, Airbus Industrie and Rolls-Royce, say that what happened over the Atlantic should never have occurred because of fail-safe systems built into their equipment.

At 5:25 a.m. on Aug. 24, with the plane at 39,000 feet and nearly 200 miles from the nearest landing site, the pilots were suddenly warned that they had a serious fuel shortage. They declared an emergency 23 minutes later, according to a chronology of events supplied by the Portuguese government. (The Azores are Portuguese territory.)

At 6:13 the fueled-starved right engine failed completely, and the pilot took the plane down to 32,000 feet.

An Airbus can fly safely on one engine, but at 6:26 the left engine shut down, too, apparently also out of fuel. Now the question is raised whether the pilot , in reacting to the emergency, mistakenly caused that to happen.

The pilot and co-pilot then maneuvered the 200-ton plane into a glide, hoping to reach the Azores, 98 statute miles away, but they were prepared to ditch at sea. The passengers, who were starting to panic, were instructed to put on life vests.

''When you don't have that other engine, sooner or later you're going to go down, you know,'' Captain Piché told reporters when he returned to Mirabel Airport in Montreal on Aug. 28. ''That's just about it. You don't have time to think about anything else than taking care of the safety of the passengers. You do as you've been taught.''

The co-pilot, Mr. DeJager, said that with virtually no precedent to go on, the crew was flying as if in a simulator, making instant decisions as problems arose. He said small propellers activated under the plane helped give the plane ''minimum hydraulics to maintain flight control.''

A spokeswoman for Airbus's North American headquarters, in Herndon, Va., Mary Anne Greczyn, explained in an interview that the propeller device is a ram-air turbine, known to pilots as a rat. It generates emergency power, but investigators have not disclosed -- and perhaps have not yet determined -- how much power was available to the flight crew. The flight's recording boxes have been sent to France for analysis, though the recorders may have stopped working when the plane lost most of its electricity.

In the cockpit, with the public address system shut down, Mr. DeJager shouted instructions to the cabin crew to relay to the passengers. Captain Piché focused on keeping the plane aloft and on course, balancing speed and altitude, with the help of traffic controllers.

''There was not much to play with,'' the captain said matter of factly. ''We didn't have a second chance to make the landing, so we did manage to guide the aircraft all the way down'' in a maneuver known as a dead-stick landing.

The plane hit ground at Lajes, a Portuguese air base on Terceira Island, at a speed the crew estimated at close to 300 miles an hour, blowing out almost all of the tires after the loss of antilock brakes on the wheels.

It was 6:46 a.m. In less than two minutes, emergency chutes had deployed and all the passengers were evacuated, said Meleni Tesic, chief of the cabin crew.

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Grace Romero, traveling to Lisbon with her husband, Agostinho, remembers the moments before the landing. ''We grabbed each other's hands very tight, hoping for the best,'' she told a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent in Portugal. ''And then, that was it. Accept whatever it was. I just didn't want to fall in the ocean. That's what I was praying for: not to fall in the ocean.''

Another passenger, Maria Cunha, said that when the plane hit the ground, there was applause, but also the sound of sobbing. Some people were too weak from terror to walk without help.

The plane remains in the Azores while the Portuguese investigation continues. Seychelle Harding, a spokeswoman for Air Transat in Montreal, said last month that because the Airbus was intact, the process of determining exactly what happened mechanically would be much easier.

Canada had another famous ''dead stick'' landing, in 1983, when an Air Canada plane ran out of fuel because refuelers had confused metric and imperial measures when loading the plane. The pilot, who had extensive glider experience, landed the Boeing 767 on a disused airfield used for auto racing and go-kart derbies in Gimli, Manitoba. That plane has become known as the Gimli Glider.

Within a few days of Air Transat's dramatic Atlantic landing, problems arose for both the pilot and the airline's ground maintenance staff.

First, it came to light that Captain Piché, who freelanced as a pilot before he joined Air Transat, had been arrested in the United States two decades ago for transporting drugs. He served part of a five-year sentence in Georgia after a plane he landed solo at a small airfield was found to be full of marijuana. Georgia pardoned him last year, on the ground that he was rehabilitated.

While Portuguese investigators say the fuel leak appears to have been the cause of the accident, there was some evidence that Captain Piché might have transferred fuel from the ''good'' engine's supply to the engine that had run dry. That decision would mean that the remaining fuel needed to keep the second engine running would have followed the same leak into the sea.

The pilot and co-pilot are declining to be interviewed on the details of what they did in the cockpit, according to Air Transat and the Air Line Pilots Association International. Aviation experts and officials in Canada are awaiting investigation results before making judgments about the crew's actions.

What is known is that there were mechanical mistakes made on the plane days before its final flight. The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto conducted a comprehensive investigation into the work done on the ground in Montreal before the flight. The newspaper reported that on Aug. 19, mechanics improperly replaced the right engine with another Rolls-Royce model from an earlier version of the same plane. The paper also said company officials, which it did not identify, had confirmed this.

Paul Koring of The Globe and Mail wrote this month that it is now clear the mechanics were ''dealing with an unfamiliar engine'' and ''ordered to proceed with the swap by an Air Transat maintenance supervisor.'' The supervisor has since been suspended.

The lead mechanic in that operation had balked at installing the replacement engine because a hydraulic pump was missing, according to this reconstruction.

He was apparently ordered to install the engine with another pump from a different engine, following the manufacturer's instructions to guarantee a safe swap.

But the mechanics seem not to have followed those printed instructions faithfully, according to The Globe and Mail, and the fuel line and hydraulic line were close enough to chafe. Portuguese investigators found mismatched pipes on the hydraulic pump.

Air Transat responds that after the switch and before the engine failure, the plane flew without problems for more than 60 hours and through numerous take-offs and landings.

Preliminary evidence in Portugal leads to the conclusion that the right fuel line finally failed, perhaps ruptured, and dumped at least eight tons of fuel before the pilots were made aware of the crisis by a warning signal.

What the flight crew knew for certain about the cause of the rapidly worsening fuel situation and, given that, whether the pilot erred in transferring fuel from the functioning engine are central questions.

When he returned to Montreal, Captain Piche did not talk publicly about exactly what he had done when the first engine failed, or whether his sophisticated instruments were telling him the whole story.

But, answering a reporter's question about heroics, he said somewhat enigmatically: ''I don't consider myself a hero, sir. I could have done without this.''

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A version of this article appears in print on September 10, 2001, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: Jet Pilot Who Saved 304 Finds Heroism Tainted. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe